Under Sleeping Suns: Two Riders Were Approaching

You're almost through the closing verse of "All Along The Watchtower," I promise you. It won't be long, now.

As you've no doubt guessed by now, when the Eternal Kings took hold of the power left on the face of Loris after the demise of the Gods Of Light And Dark and gathered up the various people that would become the citizens of Harak-Ur, they didn't get all the people who lived in Kever and its outlying neighbors. A good number of people remained in other areas. As previously discussed, there were quite a number of cultures left over after Kever fell, nearly universally blasted back to their primitive roots when The Sunfall took place. As said: Kever was the most powerful civilization of its time. It was not, however, the only civilization.

After the Eternal Kings moved their followers and faithful up out of what remained of Kever, they trod north and slightly east, into an enormous, mountain ringed valley – what would become Harak-Ur. Along the way, they lost and gained in number as some chose to stop in what were (hopefully) safe, fertile lands, or as other hopeful supplicants took up the march out of the ruined lands that had once been Kever's Valley Of Life. Today I'm going to talk about some of those people (or rather, who they became), and one of the civilizations that survived The Sunfall in relative health. Well, for certain values of "relative health," that is.

I've mentioned the war between the four Allied Nations and the Kolanthan Empire in previous essays. As will be dealt with in more detail later, the war itself has been going on for over a century – war is a very tricky, long-running endeavor when you have magic and the ability to get the wounded back on the field with a few incantations. I do intend to go into the details on how such a long-running conflict impacts the world around it, especially in environmental, cultural, and economic terms. One of the more immediate impacts, though, is that of population displacement. This is best described by discussing the Doro "invasion" of the Cualish free States.

The Doro are descended from one (or more likely, several) of the groups of Kever refugees who decided to give up on the march to this promised "new land" and stay behind in a relatively fertile, presumably safe stretch of land between Kever and Harak-Ur. If the Vetrur are modeled on a spiritual and cultural amalgamation of the Iroquois and Norse archetypes, the Doro have evolved into a combination of the Apache and Mongol traditions and attitudes. These are a fierce, powerful people. Their strength and trade comes from constantly reinforced family/clan ties, and they are pretty much the undisputed masters of the equestrian arts across most of the known world. They inhabit the plains and steppes of the lands to the east of the Kever desert, and for a good long while were immune to the depredations of the war with the Kolanthan Empire.

(As a side note, those of you who are culture buffs like myself will realize that there are a good many differences between the overall umbrella of the Apache tribes and the Mongols. Unlike the spiritual mesh that became the Vetrur, I had a hard time reconciling some of these differences. In the end, I decided to keep the religious tolerance/openness of the Mongols above all - these are a people who are very practical and pretty much just want to live and do their thing, regardless of what their neighbors believe. I also ended up keeping the Matrilineal marriage/family customs of the Apache tribes, along with the spirit-focused, shamanistic aspects of both of their spiritual systems – like the Vetrur, these are a people who are very close to the spirits of the land. They've had to be, without the Eternal Kings to guide them, and like the Vetrur they were quick to hear The Nine when those Gods arrived on the scene.)

Because of their general disposition of keeping to their own affairs, the Doro were unfortunately slow to understand the true threat of the Kolanthan Empire and what it meant in terms of disrupting their way of life. At first, they were content to let the strangers from the Southwest come into and move through their homelands. There was plenty of room, and the strangers didn't seem very interested in the Doro, per se. The strangers kept to their trails, and they mostly stayed near the coast. There was little to concern the clan councils and elders.

Without warning – as that is always as these tales begin – contact with many of the west-most and south-most clans came to a halt. Then, as winter fell some years after the first sighting of the strangers, came the smell of smoke on the wind, and the children sent to run ahead of the armies of the strangers. Feet and hands cut and let to bleed, with no shoes on their feet or clothes to protect them against the cold winter ground, the children had been sent ahead as a warning: The strangers were coming, and those who would not turn away from The Nine would be put to the sword.

As The Nine say it is the righteous path for the strong to protect the weak, so the largest, strongest clans sent their riders out into the south. Half a million strong, the riders and their mounts thundered across the prairie, and shook the earth so mightily that they say that a new riverbed was pounded into the ground by their passing. Those who returned were like ghosts, the very life drained from them, their spirits broken. Phantoms and specters haunted the survivors, the spirits of the fallen sent by the Kolanthans to harry and ravage their once-beloved kin. The clan councils and elders acted quickly, and with great sadness: they commanded the Doro to leave their villages and clan holdings behind, take only what they could carry, and ride fast and swift to the North, toward what had once been Harak-Ur.

This is how the Doro came into conflict with the Cualish Free States. With relatively little warning, the Easternmost of the Free States suddenly found hundreds of thousands of Doro refugees flooding into their lands. The Doro had been traveling for weeks, months, even, seeking to escape the destruction of their homeland. The Kolanthans left little for the Doro: the largest herds of horses slaughtered or captured, the mighty Auroch herds nearly obliterated to feed the bellies of the Kolanthan armies, rivers fouled with the corpses of those who would not take up the Book Of Kolas as their only true word. The Doro were hungry and desperate. They had little energy or faith left in them to reach out to their new landlords and make humble requests. They saw good land, with clean rivers and ample game, and they did what anyone in dire straights would do: They took it.

Suddenly finding themselves facing a conflict on two fronts – The Kolanthans in the south and the Doro to the east – the various governors and councils of the Free States did the best they could for a time. They split their attention and their forces, trying to maintain the alliances and treaties they'd forged with their allies while also defending their natural resources, and for a time it worked. Eventually the pressure from the Free States whose land was being systematically annexed by an ever growing number of Doro immigrants grew too great, and the entirety of the naval and infantry commitment of the Free States was withdrawn from the war effort so that they might focus on their internal issues.

Angarn and Cymrik, both far and away stronger than Vetris in terms of naval power, both committed more forces to make up the loss of the Cualish contingent, but the leadership of these nations all knew that without the Cualish forces, their war efforts would eventually falter, and the Kolanthans would once again rule the seas between their lands. It took nearly a decade, but eventually diplomats from Angarn (Angarn does produce some very good diplomats, let me tell you!) managed to broker not only a truce, but a deal that would benefit both the displaced Doro and the Free States as a whole. Focusing on the fact that the Doro, like the rest of the Allied Nations, all worshiped The Nine, the diplomats from Angarn brought in priests and elders from both sides, and sat them down to formulate a plan to reclaim the Doro homelands.

With warships flying the flags of Angarn, Cymrik, and a dozen Free States, the Allies laid siege to four strategic seaside ports held by the Kolanthans. Bolstered by arms and munitions given to them by the Free States, and riding alongside two full legions of Angarnian cavalry, the Doro used their traditional knowledge of their homeland to move an immense army quickly and relatively unmolested down into the Kolanthan occupied land. Over the course of a year, the four Kolanthan holdings were razed, and the Doro regained a sizable portion of their homeland. With a firm Allied colony established at Fort Vallus, the Doro and the Allied Nations found themselves at peace and focused against a common goal: The end of the Great War, and the removal of the Kolanthan Empire from the face of Loris.

Unlike the Doro, the people of the nation of Vulasha and her sister nation, Celinia, would not be so fortunate as to recover from the Kolanthan invasion of their territories. Vulasha and Celinia, a pair of young cultures at the time of The Sunfall, managed to maintain a relatively strong identity and level of advancement following that catastrophe. Essentially two large cities facing one another across a wide, slow river, the Vulashans and Celinians enjoyed ample fishing, plentiful farmland, and resource rich hills on both sides of the bowl-shaped valley they resided in. The river that cut through the valley eventually led to the sea, and thus the people of the twin cities were able to trade with Kever by both land and water. They were well protected from the majority of the devastation of The Sunfall, although the fire that fell from the sky still scarred them greatly and destroyed the bulk of their farmland.

Recovering from The Sunfall took centuries, and required the people of both cities to expand out beyond their previously perfectly adequate valley. In the centuries that followed, as the land of Harak-Ur grew and thrived, Vulasha and Celinia scrabbled back up from their cultural devastation and re-established themselves as best they could. Over time, the river that divided the valley took on a near-legendary level of importance to the people of Vulasha and Celinia. Eventually, all the land to the west of the river became the Kingdom of Vulasha, while that land to the eastern side of the river's shore became the Kingdom of Celinia. The River Valley Cities became the River Valley Kingdoms: two nations united as one in spirit, but each independent and strong in its own right. As with the Doro and the other outlying civilizations, they had no Eternal Kings, no divine power to heal the sick and injured, no near-Deific power to guide them through difficult times. The people of the River Valley Kingdoms did have a particular advantage, however: They had magicians.

The Great Library of Doan in Kever held a copy of every tome of learning necessary for magicians to ply their trade. The River Valley Cities, between them, had a full set of copies of those tomes. With these, they were able to restore a large portion of the pre-Sunfall culture. Though it took them nearly three centuries, they were able to restore a large amount of their blighted land, and with it, their prosperity. Having worked so hard to restore their land, the people of the River Valley Kingdoms When the Kolanthans – rushing southward to their "promised land" as part of their self-inflicted exile in conjunction with the Night Of Burning Eyes – arrived on the continent of Saron, the River Valley Kingdoms were there to greet them.

The people of Vulasha and Celinia were not friendly to the Kolanthans. Kolas had slain Jengo, and the effects were felt all over the world, here included. The servants and supplicants of the Mad God Kolas were outright shunned, driven out into the lands beyond the River Valley Kingdoms and into what was believed to be nothing more than still-stricken land: blighted and barren of all but the most basic levels of subsistence. Unfortunately, Kolas' followers had been preparing for this exodus for some time, and had a goodly amount of materiel, supplies, and resources available to them. Within a few decades, the Kolanthan Empire was formally established and capable of defending its borders. Within a century of their arrival on Saron, the Kolanthans had attacked and conquered the (relatively) small country of Ikurn. A handful of years later, the Kolanthan Empire fell upon the River Valley Kingdoms and devoured them whole.

Those few refugees that escaped the destruction of the River Valley Kingdoms told tales of hundreds of legions of troops, each bearing the flag of a the Mad God, each led by a ruthless and powerful Sorcerer Priest: the Inquisitors Of Kolantha. They spoke of how the Inquisition marched as one, the echo of their boots roaring like thunder through the valleys of the twin Kingdoms. They wept to recount the grisly treatment that the Haran and Ulehu suffered at the hands of the Inquisition: No attempt to convert the Small Cousins was made. Only Humans were ever given the chance to be spared the point of a spear or blade of a sword. The Kolanthans brought the songs of their Mad God and the incantations of their magicians. They brought fire and steel and cannon and steed. They brought destruction on a scale not seen since The Sunfall.


Sadly, there would be no cultural reprieve for the people of the River Valley Kingdoms. The Great Alliance had not yet been formed, as Kolantha and the nations of the North would not enter into any sort of serious conflict for decades. With Angarn, Cymrik, Vetris, and the Free States separated by hundreds of miles of open sea, the goings on in these far away, barely understood lands was of no immediate concern to the countries that would eventually form the Great Alliance. It wouldn't be until almost fifty years after the successful destruction of Vulasha and Celinia that the Great War would break out. By that time, all traces of the once affluent, influential River Valley Kingdoms was eradicated, buried under the weight of the arrow-straight avenues and promenades of the ever-expanding Kolanthan Empire. Perhaps, somewhere out there, records exist to tell a curious soul about the now vanished people that lived there not so long ago.

Perhaps not.

Under Sleeping Suns: A Wildcat Did Growl

So for the record, I know I skipped two entire verses of "All Along The Watchtower" in writing these last four essays, but I assure you it was deliberate and not accidental. That being said, let's talk about the Spirit World and its interaction with The Knot in Loris.

Last week, I mentioned in passing the spirit animals of the Vetrur, and way back here I spoke on the Cosmological Makeup of the universe that Loris resides in. In both of these, the assertion that there is a spiritual world separate but intrinsically bound to the physical world is clear and concise. In today's examination, we're going to dive into that for a while.

When The Nine began calling out from The White with their songs, it was the Vetrur who heard them first. The Vetrur legends will tell you that it's because their fierce Northmen ancestors were pure of heart and spirit, both strong of character and flawless of courage. This is no doubt at least partly true, but scholars, philosophers, and other learned folk will add this specific item to that list:

The Knot is tied in such a way that in some places, two or more of the Five Worlds touch and overlap. In some places this makes the walls between the Worlds very strong, and in others, it makes the walls so thin and weak as to not be there at all. Thankfully, the latter are very few and very far between, else the Demons of the Lower Dark might break free and run wild across the face of the world. With The Howling firmly set between the Waking World and the Lower Dark, the beasts that live within that wretched place can only foment nightmares among the living. That is what is promised, at least.

But the sixth strand of The Knot, the nameless "spirit path," does bind the Five Worlds together, and it does at some times and in some places enable interaction between the Waking World and the spirits and creatures that live within The Veil and The Howling – with good and ill coming from both, as such things do. In the north lands of the Vetrur, the spirit path is very, very strong.

The Vetrur can best be described as having a cultural base that draws heavily from both the Norse and Iroquois traditions. They're not as incompatible as you might initially think, really. To the point, however, is the focus on the rite of passage that each of the Vetrur, man or woman, boy or girl, must undergo in order to truly understand the world around them. Through the years, this set of rituals has become very well organized and planned out - there are even contingency rituals in the event that the "normal" set doesn't work to help the soon-to-be-an-adult find their new path in life. If the practice of spending up to a week in a sweat lodge, fasting save for water and elk's blood, reciting ancient chants and focusing on the flame of a candle doesn't do it for you, well, there are a few back-up plans to try.

Because of their traditions and cultural openness toward such things, coupled with the thinness of the barriers between three of the layers of The Knot, the Vetrur are as a people acutely aware of the interaction between the world they inhabit and its neighbors. A child laughing at nothing is more likely to be asked what spirits she is playing with than she is to be thought mad or addled. Vetrian legends and myths speak frequently of hunting parties led out of certain death by kindly spirits, often portrayed as the immortal, ephemeral paragons of the very creatures the hunters were seeking when they became lost in the storm. More often than not, the tale ends with the hunters realizing that their desire to kill and bring home as many of the creatures as they could was misguided, and so they learn humility from the spirit, and remember to take only what is needed. While some of these stories are no doubt merely that – stories – the bulk of them are factual accounts that also happen to be useful as morality plays.

The Vetrur, then, were perfectly positioned to hear the songs of The Nine first. As the Silver Door was opened at a juncture of The Veil and The White, so too is the homeland of the Vetrur a juncture. All things have their spirits, from the lowest beetle to the mightiest of pines. The lakes and rivers of their harsh homeland are the blood of the land, the mountains its bones, and the earth its flesh. Everything that lives within the Waking World has a counterpart in The Veil, a spirit-guide, if you will, that a strong connection must be cultivated with in order to truly live. Through their rituals and traditions, the Vetrur youths reach out to their guide and bond with it. When this has been done, they go out into the world as new people, with new, secret names, and face their homeland head on. It is a wild, hard land, a place that cannot be bent to the will of its inhabitants. Rather, they have had to learn to bend themselves to live with it, as part of it. Though they recognize the power of The Nine and their right to dominance over the world (they are the Gods, after all – usurpers or not), the Vetrur also recognize that the spirits of the world deserve their due respect and that it is better to listen to what the land has to say than it is to simply plow it under and build on it. Oh, the Vetrur farm and plow and build and till just as any other people, but they do so with the mindfulness that the land can bury them at a moments notice, should it choose. The Vetrur are not better than the animals, they are not stronger than nature. They have no Last Good King giving himself up and becoming one with the land so that his people might never know a famine, as the citizens of Angarn have. They have only themselves, and that is all they need.

The Vetrur, by and large, see themselves as one with the natural world – they are a part of life, as it is a part of them. Greatness of spirit and deed, then, are what set them apart from the rest of nature. A common Vetrian homily is that while everything is born and everything dies, the only thing that is eternal is the name of one who has lived their life to its fullest. Honor, they say, never dies.

There are and were other nascent cultures that heard the songs of The Nine and sought to strengthen the ties between The White and the Waking World. In what is today Kolantha, there were the nations of Vulasha and Celinia. Though they've long since been torn asunder and reduced to little more than ash by the Kolanthan Inquisition, the people that would come together to form those nations held strong ties to the spirits of the rivers, oceans, and savannahs that bounded their homelands. As the Vetrur and their far-flung cousins to the south turned more of their ears to the songs of The Nine, the Gods gained in power, and took up their path toward reclaiming the long-misused power of The Eternal Kings. The Reign Of Glass began when The Eternal Kings refused to become agents of The Nine on Loris, and began sacrificing their own subjects in a final, futile attempt to gather up vast reserves of spiritual power with which to fight The Nine. The Rain Of Glass was the result, and Harak-Ur was buried beneath molten flame.

Rumor and legend has it that what remains of Harak-Ur has become a weak spot in The Knot, and that nightmare creatures from The Howling now prowl about that devastated wasteland, hunting for the restless dreams of brave and foolish adventure-seekers and tomb robbers, hoping for a meal of terror and dread. Others speak of forgotten horrors from The Lower Dark becoming flesh and blood in the shadows of the shattered and ruined Ziggurat temples of the dead Kings. Very few have been so foolish as to seek out the truth of these tales. Fewer still ever return.

Under Sleeping Suns: Outside In The Distance

A question that's come up in my recurring Under Sleeping Suns game (... what, you didn't think I just slapped all this down on paper and expected it to work without play-testing it, did you?) is "If all these people in the Four Nations came out of Harak-Ur with The Last Good King, where did they get all these different cultures from?"

That's a very good question, and it bears examining. The short answer is: They didn't.

The longer answer is that the refugees from Harak-Ur that would spread out and invest themselves in the lands that would grow into the Four Nations didn't walk into a tableau of pristine, untouched wilderness. There was no vacuum there, bereft of native inhabitants and waiting for a bold new Manifest-Destiny-style expansion across the landscape. There were native cultures, living and working and going about their merry business, when Almaria Rex led the survivors out of Harak-Ur and in to Angg Dath (in Haraki, "Safe Valley").

"But what about the history of the Eternal Kings leading the survivors of The Sunfall out of Kever and into Harak-Ur?" you ask.

Well, that did happen.

Kever was the greatest and most powerful civilization of its time. It was the shining beacon of cultural advancement during its era – with massive irrigation projects using the twelve sacred rivers as their source flow, the Sun Kings of Kever fed millions of people and connected their numerous cities by way of cheap and efficient water travel. The temple-cities, obelisks, and massive pyramids of Kever still stand today, a testimony to the once mighty empire and the permanence of its reach. Kever will forever be remembered as the most prominent and influential civilization in the history of Loris. But it was not the only civilization of the time.

Through the traditional methods of exploration, expansion, and cultural drift, the people of Kever spread out just as you'd expect them to. They sailed, walked, and rode out into new lands, where they set up camp and branched out into new and different cultures all over the known world. Many of them had centuries to develop, grow, and mature. A few of them even managed to become nearly unrecognizable when compared to their Keverite origins. When The Sunfall occurred, and fire rained down from the sky, it wasn't just Kever that was for all intents and purposes wiped off the map: it was just Kever that played host to the bulk of the devastation.

In the years following The Sunfall, the powers of the Gods Of Light And Darkness coalesced and manifested in the original Eternal Kings, who would in turn use that power to gather up the various survivors of the cataclysm and lead them out of Kever and into Harak-Ur. Where the Keverite refugees had Eternal Kings to bring their people into a new, prosperous land, the other, outlying civilizations had no such benefactors. Those smaller nations that weren't completely destroyed and turned to ash were blown back into the rough equivalent of the stone age - losing nearly all of their culture and history. Where they may have once had centers of learning and magic, now they had little more than mere survival as their priority. With the Gods out of the picture, there would be no more healing chants, no answers to the prayers for a good harvest, no hymns to quiet a raging sea and bring the boats home safely.

So, as Harak-Ur rose and fell, so too did the other, outlying civilizations scrabble their way back to some semblance of their former standing. Though they would not be able to compare to the majesty of Harak-Ur (which would still pale to Kever at its height), they nevertheless developed their own cultures, traditions, languages, and more. Even though their many disparate peoples would eventually coalesce into the Four Nations, at the time of the Reign Of Glass, there were hundreds of small pockets of civilization outside of Harak-Ur. Don't tell the King Of Laws this, either, but as the Eternal Kings degenerated into madness, there were also those many brave souls who, over the years, managed to escape from Harak-Ur and into the lands beyond the mountains that encircled the Land Of Kings. Most of these lucky survivors would in fact be the progenitors of the Cualish Free States: a jumble of loosely affiliated, constantly bickering City States if ever there was one.

So, when Almaria Rex led his survivors out of Harak-Ur and into Angg Dath, he led them out into a world that already had people in it. Lots of them. As the Dark Century came to an end, the Haraki people had spread out, intermingled with their neighbors, and begun new lives. The Haraki refugees and their descendants are in nearly every case directly responsible for the coalescing of many smaller civilizations into larger, stronger nations, make no mistake. But they did not simply walk out into a series of blank-slate landmasses and set up national-identity shops over night. It took a good long while, and a great deal of effort.

Interestingly enough, it would be the various clans and tribes of the Northern lands, the people who would unify and call their home Vetris, that would be the first to hear the songs of the Gods Of The Nine. Not the Eternal Kings, not the downtrodden and desperate commoners of Harak-Ur, but these fierce, proud Northlanders. With their spirit animals and their harsh, unforgiving homelands testing their resolve at every turn, the people of Vetris lay claim to the honor of being the first people to open themselves up to the return of the Gods to Loris. Scholars and philosophers argue about why this would be to this day, but the Vetrian mystics and priests insist it has a very simple answer: The Vetrians were the only people on Loris who were attuned enough to the "heart beat" of the world around them. When the Gods Of The Nine first sought to flex their power across the world, it was the spirits of the land and the animals that reacted – and as the various clans and tribes lived and breathed along with these spirits, it was only natural that the Vetrur would hear them first.

Whether or not that supposition on the part of the Vetrur is true, now, that's another story entirely.

Under Sleeping Suns: The Hour's Getting Late

So last week, I broke off of world-building-theory and got into world-building-practice - and this week continues in that vein (not solely because I wanted to finish the verse from "All Along The Watchtower," but maybe a little bit because of that). Last week, the methods and happenings that led to the state of things as they are today in terms of the Gods and their powers in the game world. This week, the importance and impact of those Gods, their clergy, and the difference between worship and belief in a Fantasy RPG World.

Let's start with that last bit first.

In the Fantasy RPG genre, unless the game world is specifically designed to be contrary to such things, the power of the various Gods is very, very real. If the game world isn't specifically set up to be a more "real-world" style game (a-la Conan or a "Modern Magic" style game), you're dealing with a completely different definition of reality than we deal with in our day-to-day lives. Not to start a debate on whether or not the various deities of Earth actually exist or not, but let's face it: In a Fantasy RPG, when someone calls upon the power of their God, it works. It works reliably, it works with visible, tangible effects, and more often than not, it works in such a way as to prevent the concept of Atheism altogether.

Which is why I make a distinction between worship and belief in this essay: It is entirely possible not to worship any of the Gods in a Fantasy RPG. There are plenty of people in Under Sleeping Suns who do not worship Kolas, or The Nine, for instance. But that doesn't mean they don't believe in them. There's a very distinct crowbar of difference, there, and it bears examining.

In a universe or reality where someone can raise up their hands and call out a prayer to their God or Gods and have that prayer answered with a burst of magical energy that drives back the undead, or lightning from the sky, or the resurrection of a fallen comrade, there is very little in the way of denial of this one solid fact: That power is real. It is right there. You really kind of have to admit that it happened, and believe in it. But even if you believe in it, that doesn't mean that you necessarily worship or pay respect to the God or Gods that it came from.

In nearly every Fantasy RPG I've played or seen, the differences between Arcane and Divine magic are very clear - Arcane Magic can create facsimiles of life (eg, Golems, Homunculi, and the like), and is very good at turning one thing into another (either by transmuting or outright destroying it). But it very rarely can actually heal wounds or return life to the dead. Divine Magic, on the other hand, tends to work in the opposite manner - restoring life and limb, assisting in the creation of things and people, and so on and so forth. Mostly, this comes from a sort of "RPG-DNA" that can trace its way back to the original Dungeons & Dragons rules, and it's worked pretty well through all of its incarnations so far.

These distinctions between Divine and Arcane magic, then, also help to establish the barrier to Atheism in the Fantasy RPG. In a world where you can observe how Magicians operate, and see the clear differences between their art and the arts of the Clergy, more fuel is added to the "Yep, the Gods are real!" fire. There is a surety and a very clear certainty, then, in a Fantasy RPG world - When someone from that world says "I don't believe that the Gods are real," that person is either lying, or is crazy. The power of the Gods is everywhere. It heals the sick, it mends broken limbs, it feeds the hungry, and more. Heck, even in Planescape, the Athar Faction, who firmly believed that the Gods weren't actually Gods, still believed that they were incredibly powerful entities who could do some truly amazing things. You may not believe that Grebnar, God Of Pies, is the one true God of Baking, but you can't deny that Grebnar's priests do a damn good job of making those pies while under the effects of Grebnar's Prayer Of Rising Dough. Mmm. Pie.

Therefore, it stands to reason that if you have a FRPG world in which the Gods are truly real and do exist, and it follows that their power is also real, that the role of the church and clergy within that FRPG world would therefore have to rise up to reflect that reality. If Kolas can kill Jengo, and in so doing cause every last one of Jengo's priests to lose their eyes to jets of divine flame, then Kolas is powerful and real and those who worship him have just had their faith bolstered a thousand fold. If a Woundhealer of Tara can reattached a soldier's severed leg and with a few hushed verses of song bring him back to his feet with nary a scar and no pain to speak of, that soldier will return to the front lines blessing the Goddess for as long as he has breath. You may not worship those Gods, but you can't deny that those Gods exist.

Taking all of that into account, then, I got to thinking about the various FRPG's that I've played, and how with a few exceptions (again, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay figures prominently in that list) the various churches and religions of the world are just sort of there. They exist, sure. But by and large, unless a player character is a priest or paladin (or insert-flavor-of-holy-warrior-here), of a particular Deity, they don't really do much. Consider the following scenario, typical to just about any FRPG:

The party enters town, and breaks up according to their types. Alar, the Fighter, goes to the local pub and "listens for rumors," which is his code for spending his money on strong drink and loose women. Beanpole, the Rogue, goes with Alar, because Alar's always good for a laugh when he gets drunk, and well, someone has to listen for rumors. Clarice, the Wizard, heads to the Library, because she wants to study up on some new spells and do some research on the ancient tablet the party found in the ruins at the bottom of the dry lake. Finally, there's Dashiel, the Cleric, who goes to the temple of his God, and prays for guidance, studies up to his new level, and gets some more healing potions.

Nowhere along the way in any of this do any of the party members get accosted by the believers of a God or Gods opposed to Dashiel's Diety. At no point does Dashiel get called to the floor by the higher ups in his church for associating with the likes of Beanpole (a known murderer!). The Church just sort of sits there and acts as a clearing house for magical cures and curse removal, really. Is this all the fault of the Game Master? Partly, inasmuch as the life's breath of any particular game session comes from the GM, but mostly, it's on the shoulders of the writers. Yes, most FRPG's will say "God X is ruler of the domains of A, B, and C, and their clergy are expected to do D, E, and F," but beyond that, they're all window dressing and theater facades. Not even in the old Forgotten Realms edition-transition modules, where the Gods walked over all of Faerun, and the PC's were directly involved with the machinations and manipulations of the various Deities, did the churches really get active and start going about doing Church-y things. By and large, if it's a temple or church in a FRPG, it will pretty much sit there and cater to the late-night-raise-dead crowd.

And really, this isn't at all reflective of how churches work in the real world. Churches meddle. They buy land up and hold it "in trust for the people." They act as soup kitchens. They offer up weddings and funerals. In many societies, before - and even sometimes after - the invention of the concept of the separation of powers (ie, Church and State), they are the primary sources of legality and justice. Churches run the every day lives of the faithful through prayer, education, medicine, and in many cases, determining who can and cannot marry freely. Now, perhaps it was because I was busily going through a number of years of religious studies in college while I was first formulating the world of Under Sleeping Suns, and maybe it was because of my formative years being spent watching the influence that each of their particular faiths had on the various branches of my family, but the general "there"-ness that the various religions of the FRPG's I'd cut my teeth on always seemed so very lacking, to me.

Enter the Church Of The Nine.

Building up the Allied Nations as a whole, I decided early on that the cultures of Angarn, Cymrik, Vetris, and the Cualish Free States would be based on the various European, Middle-Eastern, and Northern African nations that had spawned my favorite myths. Kever draws heavily on Egypt and Babylon, while Harak-Ur is built firmly upon materials sucked out of Sumeria/Akkadia, the more dismal and dark aspects of Eastern European mythology, and the like. "Modern" Loris reflects the various spiritual enlightenment phases of southern Europe and the Middle East, as well as drawing in a goodly amount of Native American (Northeastern Atlantic and Pacific Northwest, specifically) philosophy to round some things out. All of these influences rely very heavily on faith, spiritual belief, and the very central and primal pillar of any medieval culture: The Church.

One of the fun things about the COTN is that it's essentially an intruder-religion - the Eternal Kings (possibly very rightly) saw themselves as the true inheritors of the power of the Gods Of Light And Darkness after Kever fell, and by and large didn't want to give up their power to these Deities from somewhere else. Even though the Gods Of The Nine eventually took their power back (at least in the case of Graalis, Astares, and their children), the entirety of the pantheon of the COTN are more or less usurpers of the power the Eternal Kings once held. Now, the people of the Allied Nations are all well aware of this - it's in every one of their holy books. Each of the Books Of The Nine recounts quite clearly that The Nine pretty much stole the power that the Eternal Kings held, and did so in order to make the world a better place. This is doubly compounded by the fact that Loris has no Creation Myth, as previously stated. Without that sense of primacy - without that statement of "We made this world, and we can unmake it, so do what we say or else!" - The Nine cannot simply ride roughshod over their believers. So, even though they're doing right by the people of Loris, they're also very much in a sort of religio-political hot seat: If they got their power from the Eternal Kings, who's to say their power can't be taken away or given to someone else when Fire Falls From The Sky, Everything Resets, New Era Dawns?

(Ostensibly) not being fools, the Gods Of The Nine have therefore done their level best to make sure that the people love them. As this is a FRPG, and the Gods, therefore, are real, they've empowered their clergy with very clear and defined duties in terms of Making Society Work. This is done in the name of the various Gods Of The Nine, as befits their particular area of control. Moran The Keeper demands that knowledge be shared and spread. Education, once held in super-secret-reserve by the Eternal Kings for only their most trusted thralls, is therefore a mandate of the Church. All children between the ages of six and sixteen are required to spend half their day in school, at the Temple, seven of the ten months of the calendar year. Goran The Thundermaker, as God of Storms, Battle, and Farming, teaches that there is no honor in wanton destruction and demands that his clergy be of sound mind and spirit - they practice both armed and unarmed combat, but also tend to fields and farms. Often, the truest measure of a Thundermaker is not how many battles he has won, but how many fields he's tilled and turned fruitful. This is repeated throughout The Nine - each of the Houses sets about actively involving itself in some aspect of the daily lives of the people. Lubricating, if you will, the wheels of society and doing its dead level best to make people's lives better.

The Church Of The Nine, therefore, insinuates itself into every aspect of the daily lives of the Allied Nations. It educates the young, maintains the courts and judicial system (The Restbringers are judges, bailiffs, prosecutors and defenders), sees to the quality of wines (The Starhands took this over from The Luckbringers, as it happens), and oversees the health and safety of the people of the land - from the smallest hamlet all the way up to Lendar, million-strong capital of Angarn herself. It stops just short, however, of influencing the actual act of running things, however. The people of the Four Nations have long memories, and recall a time when those with Divine Power held complete political power. As The Nine rather like having agency on Loris, and as the example of what happens when a God takes over the affairs of state in the Waking World is given by way of the nation of Kolantha, this arrangement suits them just fine.

This is not to say that everyone gets along famously and there is never any conflict. Cultural and historical prejudices remain, and crop up in the places one would expect them to in our own world. The various rights and privileges of women in Vetris, for example, are very different than those in many of the Cualish Free States. The Haran and Ulehu are treated with far more respect in Angarn than they are in Cymrik, and only a few dozen miles of water separate those two nations. The COTN does what it can - but just as in the real world, many traditions and established methods of doing things run deep. What your culture does and what your religion says are often two very, very different things.